My visit to Santiago de Chile, Chile, got off on a sour note. Why? Because of Booking.com, or possibly more because of the manager/owner of an apartment I rented on Booking.com. Either way, neither of them responded to my support requests. On Booking I got a reservation confirmation, all good, great, I had an apartment for the price of a hotel room. But, the manager/owner never contacted me with the requisite info for obtaining the key(s). I contacted Booking support and they responded with the expected cut-n-paste auto-reply "We'll contact you within 24 hours". Sure they will, I thought. And guess what? They sent me the same auto-reply 24 hours later, by then the apartment reservation time was long gone and I spent the night in a hotel anyway.

I sent another message to the manager/owner of the apartment and to Booking and now it's been three days (as of this writing) and I have recieved no replies from anyone. I found another apartment for the same price and reserved it and the owner has been great.

My first full day in Santiago was pretty much used up with walking across the city to a mall to get a pair of shoes I had ordered when I was in Antofagasta - a pair of Merrell Moab Speed shoes. And these are so comfortable! But the walk was two hours in each direction. Plus time to stop for photos along the way, then lunch, then dinner, and the day was mostly gone.

My second full day was walking around a couple of the old neighborhoods with a lot of historic houses and buildings. There is also a big park in one of them, and in that park is a locomotive museum with at least 14 locomotives and various attached cars. They also have the original train station. There are pics in the photo album.

The Plaza de la Constitució here in Santiago is one of the worst I've seen anywhere in the 8 South American countries I have been to, and over 240 cities/town. Sure, this is where the Changing of the Guard occurs, so what? There are countless small towns with better primary Plazas. The city is graffitied to the max - just about every building, modern and historic, has been tagged. The streets have too much litter for a city this size (around 7 million people) which should be able to take better care of itself. The people of Chile are no better, they are, in general, a selfish people. Oh, sure, the ones you talk to working in a retail store come across as friendly as one would expect, but on the buses and out in the streets, it's another story. While Plaza de Constitución is boring as all get-out, there are a few other nice plazas.

There's on positive thing I can say about this city - it has some nice parks. One park is called O'Higgins Park and it has several large ponds, many trails, one pond has paddle-boats. This is also the location of the domed stadium and a theme park, and it appears to be also a parade grounds next to the park. There is also Parque Quinta Normal which is where you will find the train museum. Supposedly there are 16 locomotives and a few other train cars, so it appears I may have missed one or two for photos. Another prominent park is Parque Bicentenario de Cerrillos. It is a former airport that was repurposed into a large park. It's quite nice, though when I entered the park at one end one of the park employees confirmed to me that there was an exit at the far end. I walked all the way through the park and at the far end there is no exit. There is a waste-water treatment plant, or I think that's what it is. It's gated and the security guys told me to go out one way, the go left through a field, then across a large mostly empty lot and through an opening in a fence. The alternative was to walk back into the park and eventually out a side exit. I didn't want to do that so I went to the way the security guys suggested.

Next up on my journey - Mendoza, Argentina. In general, my experiences in Chile have shown me that Chilenos are a selfish people. Oh, in the stores where they have to be nice to the customers they're nice, friendly, but outside of that environment - not so much. Of the eight countries I have spent time in in South America Chile is the least friendly. I'm skipping a few more Chilean towns and going straight on to Argentina, I've had enough of this country.